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Linux ATI drivers in use

01-11-2009, 05:17 PM

Hello everyone, this is my first post here, so I feel I should share something about myself, I'm from Spain and 27; I've been using GNU/Linux since a long time ago (I still see myself trying to deal with a Suse 6.2 and a 2.2 kernel... heh), but only coming and going not having it as the main OS, so I'm no pro at using it I know enough for the "everyday" usage.

Anyway, I'm doing a research about the kind of drivers currently available for ATI cards under GNU/Linux, and I'd like to be corrected if I'm wrong.

Ati

RadeonHD

Fglrx

Ati being the first opensource driver created through reverse engineering, with support limited to 2D acceleration.

RadeonHD being the newest driver, created from scratch based on the documentation released by AMD since last year.

Fglrx being the closed source binary driver published by AMD with full suport for both 2D and 3D acceleration.

Hello everyone, this is my first post here, so I feel I should share something about myself, I'm from Spain and 27; I've been using GNU/Linux since a long time ago (I still see myself trying to deal with a Suse 6.2 and a 2.2 kernel... heh), but only coming and going not having it as the main OS, so I'm no pro at using it I know enough for the "everyday" usage.

Anyway, I'm doing a research about the kind of drivers currently available for ATI cards under GNU/Linux, and I'd like to be corrected if I'm wrong.

Ati

RadeonHD

Fglrx

Ati being the first opensource driver created through reverse engineering, with support limited to 2D acceleration.

RadeonHD being the newest driver, created from scratch based on the documentation released by AMD since last year.

Fglrx being the closed source binary driver published by AMD with full suport for both 2D and 3D acceleration.

The ati (aka radeon) driver was written with documentation supplied by ATI for GPUs up to R200. For R3xx/4xx I believe ATI helped with 2D documentation but 3D was largely reverse engineered. Starting with 5xx we supplied documentation again, and also backfilled with register specs and programming info for r3xx/4xx.

The ati/radeon and radeonhd drivers share 3d and kernel drivers, and both support 3d acceleration for GPUs up to 5xx and rs690.

Acceleration information for 6xx and 7xx GPUs was just released recently (about 3 weeks ago) so both 2d and 3d acceleration are just being added to the open source drivers now.